Commentaries on Directions That Will Impact the Future of Technology

Archive for the tag “Cloud computing”

Analysts love to coin new expressions. The one I’m most proud of is “Business Intelligence,” which I thought was a lot sexier than “data mining” and “data warehousing,” two earlier expressions which meant essentially the same thing. IBM and a couple of other big companies jumped on the Business Intelligence bandwagon and made it an IT proverb. I shoulda copyrighted or trademarked it, or started a domain business-intelligence .com. Mighta made a few bucks. Water under the dam.

I was impressed the other day when I saw a reference to the “Personal Cloud.” This expression is claimed by Gartner Group, possibly the world’s largest techy analyst company, and mentioned prominently in a recent press release entitled “Gartner Says the Personal Cloud Will Replace the Personal Computer as the Center of Users’ Digital Lives by 2014.” (Unfortunately, personalcloud.com is already a registered domain name, indicating that Gartner isn’t any smarter than I was.)

In any event, I read the press release. I thought it made sense -sort of. Do you agree with the following quote?

“Gartner analysts said the personal cloud will begin a new era that will provide users with a new level of flexibility with the devices they use for daily activities, while leveraging the strengths of each device, ultimately enabling new levels of user satisfaction and productivity. However, it will require enterprises to fundamentally rethink how they deliver applications and services to users.”

The 46-word opening sentence aside (my composition professor would have slammed that writer), I agree that users will potentially be more productive using the cloud, but I’m having a tough time with the prediction that enterprises will have to rethink how they deliver services to users. In my experience, enterprises seldom rethink anything. Rather, they change as little as possible so as not to freak out those users and make more work for themselves.

Don’t get me wrong. I think the cloud is terrific. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the timeshare business of the late 60s – early 90s essentially offered cloud computing, but, in those days, networks were slow and storage capacity limited. Today’s broadband networks and virtually unlimited random access storage enable a user to do almost anything online instead of the desktop. The only real barrier to cloud computing is security, an issue that I believe will never get resolved.

If you are skeptical about the cloud, I’d like you to test out an app called Dropbox, a web-based file hosting service. You can get a free single-user account or an account that can be shared by several users. The learning curve is practically non-existent. It’s a great example of cloud storage.

You can also try some cloud apps. If you use Google’s gmail or calendar, you are already apping in the cloud! Others you can try for free are Quicken Online, WordPress (blogging service that I am using right now), and Adobe Photoshop Express. Check out this website, “10 cloud apps that slam-dunk their desktop counterparts.”

Of course, these personal apps have little to do with enterprise applications, but will certainly give you a taste of the possible.

Last year, IBM conducted a survey of 4,000 IT professionals in an attempt to identify the most important technology trends. The survey population included IT pros from 93 countries and 25 industries. The US, China, Russia, India and Brazil contributed the most responses. The results are published in a publicly available report titled The IBM Tech Trends Report.

This blog post shamefacedly plagiarizes from the IBM report. For many years, I conducted similar types of surveys and published similar reports, but always for individual clients who would never let the competition see the results. It is an interesting statement that IBM is willing to share its findings with anyone willing to take the time to read the material. Even more interesting (to me) is that IBM also published the survey data. Thus, if you don’t like IBM’s conclusions, you can formulate your own using its data! Very cool indeed.

The data is in SPSS format. Since not many people have SPSS, IBM cut a deal so that individuals can download and install a 14-day trial version, plenty of time to analyze the information. I’ve already done that. In future blog posts, I’ll present some of my conclusions, but I’m not going to tell you that they are based on this data, since that would be only one input that I would be inclined to use.

IBM’s study focused on four areas: business analytics, mobile computing, the cloud and social business. According to IBM, these are four critical and interconnected areas that developers must concentrate on to build what IBM’s PR folks call “The Smarter Planet.”

I’m not going to regurgitate the findings of the study – you can read that for yourself – but there are a few things that came out of the study that I think are noteworthy:

There is less interest in automation in the US than there is in the other large countries. Does this suggest that the US is so far ahead that it doesn’t think it needs it, or does the US have its collective head up its collective a-s?

Developers of mobile computing applications would be wise to concentrate on the Android platform. Although iOS is very popular in the US and developed countries, Android offers a much shorter learning curve, and will be more appealing to the rest of the world.

Cloud Computing offers new opportunities for building and delivering applications and can lead to new ways of conceptualizing business models.

The popularity of social networking in the business environment is very closely tied to culture. For example, social networking is embraced in India and spurned in Russia. The US loves it, but is worried about security and privacy.

Most of the tech trends info that is on the web is written by reporters who get most of their information from interviews with people in the booths at the latest techy conference. It’s nice to see real study results based on meaningful statistical data.